"In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small - just over 200 lines of code - but it does wonders for the Linux desktop."

Maybe, maybe not? No-one opens 2000 Nautilus windows and no-one watches 10 movies and listens to 50 MP3's at the same time.
Maybe Linux is more concerned with being actaully usefull rather han boasting pointless accomplishments.

No, but there are people that use audio editing applications with dozens of audio channels where latency matters. That is where being able to play 50 streams of audio at the same time without hiccups might be useful